M. J. Alexander

M. J. Alexander is a photographer and writer who explores the people and places of the American West, combining the vision of an artist with the skills of a storyteller. Her photographs have been published here and abroad and exhibited in venues ranging from Pleiades Gallery of New York City to New Mexico’s Hubbard Museum of the American West.

She is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States who grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, working summers as a park ranger on Lake Superior.  She earned a certificate from Cambridge University and degrees from Vassar College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She worked 15 years as a reporter and editor, half of them with The Associated Press in Manhattan; taught news writing at New York University; chaired the journalism department at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont; and traveled five continents.

Alexander has been artist-in-residence at Hedgebrook colony on Whidbey Island, Washington, and has won eight consecutive ASCAP awards for lyric writing. In 2006, Cradle of Dreams, a work for chorus and orchestra she created with Edward Knight—her husband and longtime collaborator—was commercially recorded by the Kiev Philharmonic.